Canvas Animation

I'm really impressed with the canvas node. It allows for some very intuitive work to be created quickly and easily. One area that I keep wanting to have is in animation for the shapes and textures inside the canvas. I'm making a cartoonish crescent moon with a face and I'd love to be able to animate it's eyes and mouth to look around and show expressions like smiling, sleeping and being surprised.

Yeah, I thought about using the canvas texture as an input for some of the animatable nodes. But I couldn't figure out how that would allow the shape to do more character type of animation. Also, I noticed that none of the textures as viewed through the canvas node have animation properties. As consequence, if I want to draw a bird as a shape and fill it in with a texture I can apply animation to the static image produced by the canvas, but I can't make the bird flap it's wings or turn it's head and I can't make the feathers fluff out (as part of a texture animation). There's a whole level of expressiveness that such a feature would enable. But it's also possible that this functionality is not in line with the future vision of Genetica. It is a texture generation tool for artists with a node that allows a more traditional approach to vector based images.

I have no idea how difficult it is to implement the above behavior. As such I'm trying to pose my request in a gentle and humble tone.

There's a whole level of expressiveness that such a feature would enable. But it's also possible that this functionality is not in line with the future vision of Genetica. It is a texture generation tool for artists with a node that allows a more traditional approach to vector based images.

A good point there, unless Spiral Graphics suddenly made their development team much larger, it would be wise for them to concentrate on Genetica as a texture making tool (fulfilling long-time requests such as non-square textures and maybe even rewriting it so it can also be on OSX and Linux).

Deviating from that and trying to make it into a wannabe 3D/2D animation studio will only put off a large number of users who bought it for its texture creation capabilities. I know that some here would actually like to see that happen, but the potential cost in terms of lost sales could outweigh the benefits.

Sweet Dragon dreams, lovely Dragon kisses, gorgeous Dragon hugs. How sweet would life be to romp with Dragons, teasing you with their fire and you being in their games, perhaps they can even turn you into one as well.

So what do you think the vision for Texture animation should encompass? There's a heavy price difference between the studio and pro editions where the feature comparison chart on the website's buy page shows that the studio edition has the addition of pixel script, animation and output texture size. What, in your opinion, would make the animation worth the extra $500? Maybe I'm somewhat oblivious to something very obvious?